Just weeks after Donald Trump took office in 2017, The Washington Post for the first time in its 140-year history chose a motto: Democracy Dies in Darkness. It was an obnoxious and pretentious political move for a self-proclaimed unbiased media publication. The once-great paper’s activist-journalists have clearly become unhinged concerning Trump — to the point that four of them are now oblivious to the irony that they’re advocating killing our system of government.

Dies in darkness, indeed.

In a four-byline article attacking the Electoral College, the Post’s quartet preys upon the population’s woeful civic ignorance perpetuated by leftist-controlled public schools. Unfortunately, the Post’s scribes and executives are themselves ignorant — the United States is not a democracy, though too many people do use the word as a synonym for “freedom.”

Our Founders established a Republic, not a democracy, and John Adams explained why: “Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

As part of that Republic, our Founders thoughtfully established the Electoral College for electing presidents and split power in Congress between a House based on population and a Senate based on the equality of states. The objective was to diffuse power and protect the minority by preventing a handful of population centers from becoming echo chambers and then dictating to the rest of the country how things would happen.

To that point, Mark Alexander recently noted, “In the 2020 election, there were more votes cast in Los Angeles County than the vote totals in 38 states.” Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by seven million votes nationally — five million in California and two million in New York.

Oh, and by the way, Alexander said, “More than 80% of LA votes were bulk-mail ballots.”

The civic geniuses at The Washington Post, however, are mad that their team lost two presidential elections in the last couple of decades despite winning the national popular vote. In 2020, Biden avoided the fate of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore by the narrowest of margins — about 43,000 votes in three states, which was smaller than Trump’s winning margin in 2016. The Post is sounding the alarm that a Republican (worst of all, Trump) could win again in 2024 thanks to the “antiquated” system “handed down from the nation’s founding fathers.”

The title and subtitle say it all: “Small segment of voters will wield outsize power in 2024 presidential race. The electoral college system empowers a sliver of the U.S. population in a diminishing number of battleground states. And the majority may not even prevail.”

We’ll bet those four journalists don’t worry about a “sliver” of the population when it comes to the Rainbow Mafia’s liturgical calendar.

Instead, they fret about how we don’t use “the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ that governs legislative races,” so “the ballots of undecided swing-state citizens” outweigh “the other 150 million or so Americans who are expected to vote next year.” Worse, “the system increasingly distorts the democratic process as partisan divisions grow along geographic lines.”

It’s true that Americans are increasingly moving to like-minded states, and that presidential campaigns target fewer battleground states as a result. Our divisions also feel increasingly heated and problematic, which we suppose is bound to happen when, for example, one side starts denying basic biology while, without evidence, accusing the other side of hateful bigotry.

But those divisions are not because the system is flawed.

What’s almost amusing is that the Post’s screed is part of a series in which the paper explores those divisions. In another article in the series, the Post complains about Trump’s “relentless attacks … on the legitimacy of the election process based on lies and distortions.”

Which is precisely what the Post is doing by attacking the Electoral College, the constitutional system for conducting elections.

This also follows the Post’s utterly ridiculous freakout last week about Trump “the dictator.”

Why the urgency? Well, it’s simple: Leftists at the Post and elsewhere are terrified that the cognitively disabled architect of Bidenomics might just blow it in 2024. Unlike in 2020, when hardly a single poll taken at any time during the 2020 cycle showed Trump leading Biden, numerous polls this time have the former president ahead. The latest is a Wall Street Journal poll that has Trump up by four points.

The heretofore biggest argument against Trump was that he’s so unpopular he couldn’t possibly win. If you trust the polls, that may no longer be true. Then again, Biden is unlikely to be the Democrat nominee, which would totally change the game. Either way, leftists are sowing distrust in advance if Democrats lose.

Attacking the Electoral College isn’t new ground, of course. The Washington Post’s editorial board called for its elimination in the wake of the 2020 election. And the Left has been building a National Popular Vote initiative for years.

The bottom line is that leftists demand power, and anything that stands in their way must be eliminated. That explains a seemingly contradictory reality: Leftists are wrecking elections by denying the legitimacy of results they don’t like, all while besmirching their opponents for sounding the alarm about that undermining of integrity.